Grave on Grand Avenue Page 22

  Classic tiger father, I think.

  “Mr. Xu always positioned himself to be greater than he really was. That’s why he got a British language tutor for Xu. In his mind, Europe, the home of classical composers, was the best. But Xu didn’t get into the conservancies there. America was his father’s second choice.”

  “We fell in love through our music. Even though we didn’t have many opportunities to talk, to be alone, whenever we were playing in the same room, we played for each other.”

  I’m not a romantic, not by a long shot, but even I cannot help being a little affected by Cece’s story of their courtship.

  “But I’m from Taiwan. Xu, mainland China. It’s not impossible for other couples, but it was impossible for Xu and me. First of all, there was Xu’s father. Practice, practice, practice. No time for girls. And then there was Xu’s uncle, a rising star in the Party.”

  She registers my blank look. “You know, the Communist Party.”

  Although Benjamin often derides me for my lack of knowledge when it comes to Asian international affairs, I do know enough to be aware that there’s tension between the “two Chinas,” because mainland China doesn’t recognize Taiwan as an independent country. Relations between the two entities seem to go back and forth. Here in LA, mainland Chinese and Taiwanese sit together in the same restaurants, shop in the same grocery stores (sometimes even in Japanese ones!). The things that divide people overseas don’t seem to have the same pull over here in California.

  “Then his father was called back to China by his wife for a brief time. That’s when Xu and I were able to spend time together, one-on-one.”

  I know what she’s saying with that.

  “When Mr. Xu returned, he told his father that we wanted to be together. We wanted to be married. Technically, we were of age. We could have run off. But Xu is a dutiful son. He didn’t want to go against his father. His father exploded. He flew into a rage. He said that by marrying me, Xu would be a disgrace, not only to his family, but to his country. Xu was miserable, crushed. He didn’t know what to do. He fell in a deep depression.”

  Cece starts to blink faster. “Then came word about the Stradivarius. The long-lost cello, brought over to China by Italian monks and protected during the Cultural Revolution. This was to be presented to Xu by his uncle. A precious gift from this country. That instrument saved him but would ruin us because how could he turn his back on such a gift? So I made it easy for him. I broke it off. I knew that he would have chosen me, sacrificed his music career, his family, his country, even his instrument for me. But I couldn’t let him do that.”

  She moistens her lips. “So we separated, but it was eating my soul. It didn’t make my feelings go away. Then the following year, the concert season for this year was announced. Xu was coming to Los Angeles to play with us.”

  “And he wanted to see you.”

  Cece nodded. “And I, more than anything, wanted to see him. During the rehearsals, we were again speaking through our music. Our love was still there. We knew that we needed to be together. But how could we speak freely, with Xu’s father constantly at his side? Then the accident happened with the gardener. That changed everything. Fang Xu has been distracted, constantly on the phone with China. Through that tragedy our love could once again bloom.”

  Good for you, I think. Not so good for Fuentes’s family. “I saw you. The night of Xu’s concert. Here in the parking lot. Here, in fact. You were arguing with someone.”

  Raising one of her perfectly manicured eyebrows, Cece practically dares me to identify the person.

  “You were arguing with Fang Xu. You didn’t want them to leave for China.”

  “Xu was not going back to China.”

  “Then where is he? The police need to speak with him.”

  “I have no idea where he is.” Cece says the words in a string of staccatos. “I’ve told you everything. Can I leave now?”

  I nod. I stand back as she gets in her car, puts it in reverse and speeds out of the artists’ parking level. A part of me wants to charge after her, Fast and Furious style. I believe she’s telling most of the truth, but not all of it. I have no doubt that she knows exactly where Xu is, and maybe his father, too.

  SEVENTEEN

  I come home relatively early from work the next day. I feed Shippo and then change into shorts and a T-shirt to go jogging. As I run on the sidewalks broken by age or buckled by roots of old trees, I can’t help but keep thinking about Eduardo Fuentes. I have no idea whether RJ’s admission is going to clear his uncle’s name in any way. Could Fang Xu be charged with something? And since the LAPD has no clue where he is, does it even matter?

  I run faster, running past the Police Museum on York Boulevard, where a 1929 Model A police car is on display behind a gated driveway. I almost trip on some hard round fruit fallen from an overhanging tree beside an income tax business in a barred house. I keep going until I cross the street on the corner of Galco’s Old World Grocery, seller of vintage and specialty glass-bottled sodas and candy like sarsaparillas, cucumber soda and wax lips.

  As my breathing quickens, I stop thinking about Cece, Xu or the cello. I don’t think about Cortez, Puddy or Aunt Cheryl. And last of all, Nay, Benjamin and Benjamin’s mother all slip and dissolve away. My running shoes hit the pavement. Air pushes out from my lungs, up my throat, nose and mouth. The rhythm of running is all I feel. I’m just in the now, right this moment, nowhere else.

  When I return home and unlock the door of my house, I sink in my chair, stinky and sweaty. Then I do a double take at the sight of Shippo sitting placidly at my feet, his corkscrew tail moving back and forth. Usually he greets me, jumps all over me to beg for either a treat or his next meal. What’s going on?

  Then I spy something at my feet. There are two pieces. Brown and exactly the same size. Damn, is it dog poop? I get down on my knees for a closer look. Shippo wanders toward them and I shoo him away. I get up to retrieve a poop bag and gingerly pick one of them up. It’s hard and cold. What the hell?

  It’s obviously not poop, but some kind of fancy dog treat. I recognize it from the high-end natural dog food store down the street, something gourmet, duck or bison. How did it get in my house? Since they are still cold, the food was scattered recently. Like perhaps minutes ago.

  I carefully search my house, the living room first. The windows are all secured closed. This house is ancient, probably from the fifties, and the landlord just adds a fresh coat of paint for each new tenant. So the windows, unfortunately, are pretty much painted shut. The one in the bathroom is the only one that actually goes up and down—it’s closed, but I see a lot of paint chips on the floor by the toilet. My window is small; I could barely fit through it. An adult would have to be quite the contortionist to get their body through there.

  Then in the bedroom, I notice that my dresser drawer is open, just a crack. No. No friggin’ way.

  But it’s true. I pull open the drawer and my laptop is still there. But next to it, where my Glock should be, is an empty space. I swear, long and repeatedly. I sit on the edge of my couch and cover my face. Who else knew where I stored my gun? Who else would take my Glock but not my computer? Shippo comes over to me and jumps on my knees. He senses that I’m upset.

  “It’s not your fault, Shippo.” I pet his head. I took him to the groomer on my day off and he still smells sweet from the oatmeal shampoo. There’s something caught in his collar—a piece of black string? No, it’s a long curly hair. Hair from a poodle.

  I curse again. Proof that my effing long-lost grandfather has stolen my gun.

  It doesn’t matter if I report it missing; if someone does anything illegal while using my gun, I’ll be sunk. The media will be unforgiving. If my gun, an LAPD officer’s gun, gets used in the commission of a crime, the public won’t care about the illegal circumstances in which it was obtained. They will just stamp the department as BAD and
the officer who owned the gun as the WORST.

  I can’t even tell Aunt Cheryl that my gun has been stolen. If she tries to cover it up in some way, she’ll get in trouble. Then again, if she doesn’t know about it, she’ll be in trouble, too.

  I rub my eyelids with my fingers. I’m all sweaty and filthy. Definitely apropos. Get a grip, Ellie. Think. I’m so scattered and freaked-out, I can’t even find my cell phone for a moment, and then I realize that it’s in the pocket of my shorts.

  “Lita, it’s me, Ellie.”

  “Querida, so nice—”

  “I don’t have time for all that.” I’m being super rude, but I can’t help it. “I need to figure out where Fernandes might be. Or maybe that other guy, Ron Sullivan.”

  “But why?”

  “Lita, please.”

  “I have no idea. You were the one who told me that Puddy lived in San Bernardino.”

  “What if he needed to hang out somewhere close by? Aunt Cheryl says the taxi dropped him off in North Hollywood on Mother’s Day.”

  “Well, he used to hang out in this bar in North Hollywood. That’s where we met. But that was sixty years ago, querida. Many lifetimes ago. Although . . .”

  “Yes, Lita?”

  “Although I heard that it was going to reopen. Some younger relatives of the original owner.”

  It’s a long shot. An extreme long shot. But I’m desperate. I tell her, “I’m in trouble, Lita. I think that Fernandes might have stolen my gun.”

  “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” she says.

  “Wait, what?”

  “You stay put. We’ll handle this together.”

  * * *

  Lita actually makes it in thirteen minutes and quickly agrees with my initial attribution of the theft to Fernandes’s handiwork. “Who else could it be? He probably snooped around and saw it there the other day when he went through your room to the bathroom. He knew exactly where to find it.”

  We drive in Lita’s yellow Cadillac. I’m thankful that she is literally taking over the wheel. My hands are wet with nervous sweat and starting to shake. How could this guy—the man who claims to be my flesh and blood, my grandfather—do this to me? I wish I’d never met him. I wish that he’d never come back into Lita’s life. We were all better off without him.

  The other reason I’m glad Lita is driving is that she knows exactly where we’re going. She doesn’t need a GPS or Google Maps to tell her where to go. She has an internal compass that pulls both of us through the freeways and streets of Los Angeles and now North Hollywood.

  We finally park on Lankershim, one of the main boulevards in the city, in front of a construction site. The facade of an older building in the back is still visible; it’s a dome, shaped like a German beer stein. Dirt is everywhere. A blue Porta-Potty is off to one side.

  A man about my father’s age with a graying beard seems to be the person in charge.

  “Hel-lo!” Lita says to him. It’s amazing to see my seventysomething grandmother turn on the charm with someone who could be her son.

  “Hi.” He brushes his hands on his dirty jeans and walks over to us.

  “I’m an old-time customer here. So excited to see it reopen.”

  “Me, too. We’ve been working seven days a week to make it happen. It was my father’s place. I actually grew up here. I want to make it what it was back then. Like Cheers, right?”

  “You’re Saunders’s son?”

  The bearded man nods. “He died a couple of years ago. I came back home to help my mother take care of her affairs. That actually gave me the idea to do something with this property again. Would you like to take a look?”

  We walk past an outdoor deck where most of the renovations are taking place. When we go inside the building, Lita immediately comments on the sunroof. “I like all the light. It used to be so dark in here,” she says.

  The bar owner nods. “We are definitely going to be mixing the new with the old.” An old door, a makeshift table on two sawhorses, is in the middle of the room. On top of it are all sorts of old furnishings that do look fifty years old: doorknobs, switch and light socket plates, and grills.

  I’m getting a bit impatient about their leisurely pace of conversation. This is not a nostalgia tour. “We’re actually in search of an old customer,” I interrupt.

  “A lot of them have actually been coming around. Excited about the eventual opening, I guess.”

  “Pascoal Fernandes. He could also be going by Puddy.”

  “Puddy Fernandes? No, I’m afraid that that name doesn’t ring a bell. And I’d remember that one.”

  Lita and I exchange looks. Is this just a complete dead end? I take a second look at the beat-up doorknobs and remember the rusty screws littering the backseat of the Green Mile. I quickly scroll through some photos on my phone while Lita and the bar owner engage in more small talk. I hate to do this to Dad, but I don’t have that many options. “How about someone who kind of looks like this? He’d be twenty years older with a mustache.”

  The bar owner takes hold of my phone and stares at a photo of Dad that I took on New Year’s Day. He’s looking goofy and holding a big bowl of ozoni, a Japanese clear broth with fish and nuked mochi floating in it.

  “Oh, that looks like Noah. A younger version.”

  “Noah?”

  “Yeah, Noah Rush.”

  Fernandes stole my brother’s name? That’s low.

  “Noah’s been helping me go to junkyards and picking up old furnishings for me. Or picking up purchases from craigslist. But then he lost his wheels. Said his old lady took away his car.”

  “Oh, he did, did he?” I can see the steam rise from Lita’s head. I hold her elbow. We are too close to finding him to blow it.

  “Do you know where he is? It’s very important. We have something valuable to give him.”

  “Oh, yeah? He’s been talking about how he was waiting for something that was owed to him.”

  I bet.

  “He’s in that hotel down the street. You know, the Bavarian Inn?”

  “The Bavarian Inn is still there?” Lita’s voice is thin.

  “Yeah, new owners, of course. But still hanging around.”

  We thank the bar owner and Lita promises to come to the grand opening in September. As we walk back to her car, she seems a bit distracted.

  “Are you okay, Lita?” Perhaps all these old memories are too overwhelming.

  “The Bavarian Inn,” she says weakly.

  “You know it?”

  “That’s . . . umm . . . That’s where your father was conceived.”

  Definitely TMI for this granddaughter, though it certainly explains why Lita now resembles a limp rag.

  “Lita, give me the keys.” I wait until she gets in the passenger side and then buckle myself into the driver’s seat. I speed up the street. The sun is just starting to go down. The Bavarian Inn sign is in some kind of Germanic-style font. The office has a high-pitched roof with a rooster weather vane bent at a forty-five-degree angle. The rooms themselves are in a two-story building that has definitely seen better days.

  “It didn’t used to look like this,” Lita says apologetically, as I park the car in the cracked parking lot. The paint for the parking lines has faded so that I’m not even sure if we’re in a legitimate spot. Since there are only five other cars here, I think we’re good.

  We get out of the car, bringing with us the security club that Lita uses on her steering wheel. You never know when a club may come in handy.

  Above the traffic noises, I hear something: the high-pitched sound of a dog barking, coming from the second floor. I quickly follow the barking, while Lita more slowly makes her way up the stairs behind me.

  “Fernandes.” I rap on the door with the end of the steering wheel club. “Let me in! It’s me, Ellie.”

  The ba
rking gets louder, but it sounds like it’s coming from a back room. Bacall must be locked in the bathroom.

  “Fernandes! I need my gun back.”

  Lita has finally caught up with me, her chest heaving from the physical activity.

  “I don’t care what you do with your life, Puddy,” she says once she’s caught her breath. “But you can’t do this to Ellie. Give my granddaughter her gun back.”

  The door is unlocked and then opened a crack. I tell Lita to stay in the hallway as I slowly walk in, clutching the club in my right hand.

  Bacall’s barking gets more furious, but I can’t see her. It’s dark in the room, other than light seeping through the open door and sides of the window not covered by a dirty curtain. There are two men on the floor, their feet and hands secured by what looks like multiple rounds of Duct tape. Duct tape also covers their mouths. The two men are both alive and wriggle like worms. It’s amazing that Fernandes could do this on his own, without the assistance of a partner.

  As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I spot Fernandes in the far corner. He holds my Glock, first aiming it toward his hostages on the floor and then at me. I hear Bacall’s paws scratch at the closed bathroom door.

  “What have you done, Puddy?” I hear Lita behind me.

  “Close the door,” he says, and Lita enters the room with me and shuts the door behind her.

  Lita visibly reacts to the older Duct-taped man. It must be Ron Sullivan.

  “Is this the best you can do? Claim something you lost fifty years ago?” Lita says.

  “I did time for the first heist. Didn’t get my share for the second one. I deserve something for all that.”

  “And you want to benefit from the evil they have done? They killed a man, Puddy. You’re a lot of things, but you’re not a killer.”

  “I haven’t killed anyone. Yet.”

  “And you’re not going to kill anyone else, either. At least not with my granddaughter’s gun.” Lita takes a few steps forward so that she’s standing next to me. She stretches out her hand. “Give it to me.”